What is a 13f Filing FAQ: Your Top Questions Answered
A 13F filing is a quarterly disclosure required by the SEC from institutional investment managers with at least $100 million in qualifying assets under management. The form lists every U.S. equity position the manager held at the end of the quarter, including the number of shares and their market value on that date. What is a 13f filing in practical terms: a delayed but real snapshot of where the largest money managers were positioned at a specific point in time. The SEC publishes 13Fs publicly within 45 days of each quarter-end, making them the most accessible window into institutional stock holdings available to retail investors.
Key Takeaways
- What is a 13f filing: a mandatory SEC disclosure from institutional managers with $100M+ in qualifying assets, covering U.S. equity positions at each quarter-end.
- The 45-day filing deadline means the most recent 13F is always at least six weeks old by the time you read it.
- 13Fs cover only long equity and options positions. They do not include short positions, bonds, cash, foreign stocks, or wholly-owned subsidiaries.
- Managers can request confidential treatment on positions they are still building, so the public 13F is sometimes incomplete at filing date.
- The SEC's EDGAR database makes all 13F filings searchable and free to access at
sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar. - Our guru tracker aggregates 13F data from 40+ institutional managers and alerts you when positions change.
The Legal Origin of 13F Filings
Section 13(f) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 mandated the disclosure. Congress passed the requirement in 1975 as part of a broader effort to increase transparency in securities markets after the 1970s market instability. The SEC implemented the rule the following year, requiring quarterly filings within 45 days of each quarter-end.
The original intent was to give the public information about the concentration of institutional ownership in specific securities, which Congress viewed as a systemic risk factor. What emerged in practice is a research dataset that individual investors use to study institutional conviction.
The 13F requirement applies to managers who exercise investment discretion over $100 million or more in Section 13(f) securities at any point during the year. Once a manager crosses that threshold in any month, they must file for the remainder of that calendar year and the following full year, even if assets later fall below $100 million.
What a 13F Discloses and What It Does Not
The disclosure covers:
- Exchange-listed equity securities
- Shares of closed-end investment companies
- Exchange-traded equity options and warrants
- Convertible debt securities
The disclosure does not cover:
- Short positions (there is no requirement to report short bets)
- Cash or Treasury holdings
- Fixed income securities
- Foreign-listed stocks (stocks that trade primarily outside U.S. exchanges)
- Wholly-owned subsidiaries or private equity investments
| Category | Included in 13F | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. common stock | Yes | Listed positions above $10,000 |
| Call options (long) | Yes | Reported as share equivalents |
| Put options (long) | Yes | Appears under "Put/Call" column |
| Short positions | No | Not required by current rules |
| Cash and T-bills | No | Not Section 13(f) securities |
| Foreign stocks | No | Only appears if ADR is U.S.-listed |
| Private equity | No | Not exchange-listed |
| Crypto assets | No | Not recognized as 13(f) securities |
This gap between what is disclosed and what is not is where misreading 13Fs most commonly happens. When Berkshire Hathaway's 13F showed no new large equity purchases in 2022-2023, some analysts concluded Buffett was sitting on cash. He was also simultaneously buying Japanese trading houses through Tokyo-listed shares, which never appeared in the 13F.
The 45-Day Delay and What It Means for Research
The 45-day window was designed to balance transparency with market impact. Requiring same-day disclosure would allow front-running of institutional positions at scale. The 45-day gap gives the manager time to finish building or exiting a position before the disclosure triggers copycat trades.
For researchers, this delay changes how you interpret the data. If the 13F shows a fund increased its AAPL position by 5 million shares in Q1, you are reading that on May 15 at the earliest. Apple (AAPL) carries a P/E near 28.3 and ROIC near 45.1%, but if the stock moved significantly in April, the fund's current view may already differ from what the filing shows.
The practical discipline is to treat 13F data as context, not as a trading signal. It tells you which stocks warranted institutional conviction at a specific price level. The current price and your own valuation work determine whether that level is still relevant to your investment thesis.
How Managers Request Confidential Treatment
When an institutional manager is actively building a large position, disclosing it in a 13F would drive up the price against them. The SEC allows managers to request confidential treatment by filing a Form 13F-CTR alongside their regular 13F-HR, asking that specific positions be withheld from the public for up to one year.
The SEC reviews each request and grants or denies it based on whether disclosure would harm the competitive interests of the applicant. For positions being actively accumulated, approval is common.
This means a 13F can be simultaneously accurate and incomplete. The manager filed everything they were required to disclose. The positions under confidential treatment simply do not appear until the SEC releases them, either when the manager stops accumulating or when the confidential period expires.
Berkshire Hathaway has used confidential treatment multiple times. The Occidental Petroleum position was partially built under a confidential filing before being disclosed in full.
Using 13F Data in a Value Investing Workflow
The most productive way to use 13F filings is as a research filter, not a buy list. The sequence that works:
- Identify managers whose historical record and investment philosophy you respect.
- Track their 13F filings to see which new positions they initiated or materially increased.
- Run those names through independent fundamental analysis: P/E ratio, ROIC, free cash flow yield, Piotroski F-Score for financial strength, and a DCF to estimate intrinsic value.
- Buy only when your own analysis confirms a margin of safety at the current price.
For JNJ, which carries a P/E near 15.4 and a 3.1% dividend yield, seeing multiple institutional managers increase positions in the same quarter is useful information. But it is a starting point for research, not a conclusion.
Our screener with 120 indicators across 73 global exchanges lets you run steps 3 and 4 for any stock appearing in a manager's 13F, without switching tools.
The VMCI Score and 13F Convergence
The VMCI Score at ValueMarkers weights five pillars: Value (35%), Quality (30%), Integrity (15%), Growth (12%), and Risk (8%). When a stock scores highly on Quality and Value and simultaneously appears as a new or increased position across multiple institutional 13Fs, the convergence is worth investigating.
This is not a mechanical signal. It is a prioritization mechanism. The VMCI highlights stocks with strong fundamentals; the 13F data shows that other well-resourced analysts arrived at a similar conclusion. The combination narrows your watchlist to names that have passed both quantitative screening and real-money institutional scrutiny.
MSFT, with a P/E near 32.1 and ROIC near 35.2%, scores high on Quality and Growth but carries a valuation premium that compresses the Value pillar score. Multiple 13F disclosures consistently show institutional managers holding Microsoft through market cycles, reflecting conviction in its durability over absolute cheapness.
Further reading: SEC EDGAR · FRED Economic Data
Why 13f filing sec Matters
This section anchors the discussion on 13f filing sec. The detailed treatment, formula, and worked examples appear in the body of this article above. The points below summarize the most important takeaways for value investors who want to apply 13f filing sec in real portfolio decisions. ValueMarkers exposes the underlying data on every covered ticker via the screener and stock profile pages, so the concepts in this article translate directly into actionable filters.
Key inputs for 13f filing sec
See the main discussion of 13f filing sec in the sections above for the full treatment, including the inputs, the calculation methodology, the typical sector benchmarks, and the most common pitfalls to avoid. The ValueMarkers screener lets value investors filter the full universe of 100,000+ stocks across 73 exchanges using 13f filing sec alongside the rest of the 120-indicator composite, with sector percentiles and historical trends shown on every stock profile.
Sector benchmarks for 13f filing sec
See the main discussion of 13f filing sec in the sections above for the full treatment, including the inputs, the calculation methodology, the typical sector benchmarks, and the most common pitfalls to avoid. The ValueMarkers screener lets value investors filter the full universe of 100,000+ stocks across 73 exchanges using 13f filing sec alongside the rest of the 120-indicator composite, with sector percentiles and historical trends shown on every stock profile.
Related ValueMarkers Resources
- Margin of Safety — Margin of Safety expresses how cheaply a stock trades relative to its fundamentals
- DCF Intrinsic Value — DCF captures how cheaply a stock trades relative to its fundamentals
- Piotroski F-Score — Piotroski F-Score captures the reliability of reported earnings versus underlying cash flow
- Berkshire Hathaway Next 13f Filing Date — related ValueMarkers analysis
- Michael Burry 13f — related ValueMarkers analysis
- Residual Income Model For Stock Valuation — related ValueMarkers analysis
Frequently Asked Questions
what happens if the stock market crashes
A stock market crash reduces the nominal value of equity holdings, sometimes by 30-50% over a period of months. For investors with long time horizons and no forced selling, a crash is a price reduction on businesses they already evaluated. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B, P/E near 9.8, P/B near 1.5) consistently buys more during crashes rather than less, because the businesses underlying the stocks have not changed as much as the prices suggest. The practical impact depends on your liquidity needs, your debt obligations, and whether you need to sell holdings to fund living expenses during the downturn.
what time does the stock market open
The U.S. stock market opens at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time on weekdays, excluding market holidays published annually by the NYSE. Pre-market trading on major exchanges begins at 4:00 a.m. Eastern, but volume and liquidity are substantially lower before 9:30 a.m. For international exchanges, opening times vary: the London Stock Exchange opens at 8:00 a.m. GMT, the Tokyo Stock Exchange at 9:00 a.m. JST, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at 9:30 a.m. HKT.
what time does the stock market close
The U.S. stock market closes at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time. After-hours trading continues from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern on most electronic communication networks (ECNs), but spreads widen and volume drops sharply after the 4:00 p.m. bell. Options markets close at 4:00 p.m. for stock options on most exchanges. The official closing price used for index calculations, ETF net asset values, and mutual fund pricing is the 4:00 p.m. Eastern print.
why is the stock market down today
Stock markets fall for many reasons: rising interest rate expectations, disappointing earnings reports from large index components, geopolitical events, or broad risk-off sentiment. For any specific day, the proximate cause is usually visible in financial news within minutes of a significant move. Structurally, equity prices reflect discounted future cash flows, so anything that raises discount rates (interest rates, risk premiums) or reduces expected cash flows (earnings misses, economic slowdowns) pushes prices lower. Our screener is more useful on down days than up days, because temporarily depressed prices sometimes create margin-of-safety entry points in high-quality businesses.
what time does stock market open
U.S. equity markets open at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday, excluding federal holidays designated as market holidays by the NYSE. The pre-market session runs from 4:00 a.m. Eastern on ECNs, but institutional quality execution typically waits until regular session hours. Limit orders placed before market open execute at or better than the limit price once trading begins; market orders placed pre-market on ECNs can fill at wider spreads than during regular hours.
is coca cola a good stock to buy
Coca-Cola (KO) trades at a P/E near 23.7 and yields approximately 3.0%, with 60+ consecutive years of dividend growth as of 2026. The business has genuine pricing power: it raised prices through the 2021-2023 inflation period without significant volume loss. At current valuations, KO offers a stable but modest return profile. Berkshire Hathaway has held KO since 1988 at a cost basis far below today's price, treating it as a permanent holding rather than a valuation call. For a new buyer, the question is whether 3% yield plus low-single-digit earnings growth meets your return requirements compared to alternatives.
Follow along as institutional managers disclose their quarterly positions. Set up your watchlist on our guru tracker and receive alerts the moment any tracked manager files their next 13F with the SEC.
Written by Javier Sanz, Founder of ValueMarkers. Last updated April 2026.
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Disclaimer: This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.